Herodotus

Herodotus was a Greek historian who was born in Halicarnassus, Caria and lived in the fifth century160BC , a contemporary of Socrates. He is widely referred to as The Father of History he was the first historian known to have broken from Homeric tradition to treat historical subjects as a method of investigationspecifically, by collecting his materials systematically and critically, and then arranging them into a historiographic narrative. The Histories is the only work which he is known to have produced, a record of his inquiry on the origins of the GrecoPersian Wars, including a wealth of geographical and ethnographical information. Some of his stories were fanciful and others inaccurate yet he states that he was reporting only what was told to him and was often correct in his information. Despite Herodotus historical significance, little is known of his personal history.

Before the Persian crisis history had been represented among the Greeks only by local or family traditions. The Wars of Liberation had given to Herodotus the first genuinely historical inspiration felt by a Greek. These wars showed him that there was a corporate life, higher than that of the city, of which the story might be told and they offered to him as a subject the drama of the collision between East and West. With him, the spirit of history was born into Greece and his work, called after the nine Muses, was indeed the first utterance of Clio.

Source: Wikipedia